Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Business to Business Companies Plebiscite Direct Marketing For Lead Generation

Is direct marketing dead? Surely not. It remains a strong customer relationship management medium. Its role has evolved due to several factors:

The rise of social media and in overall Internet activities.

The rise of paper costs, impacted by ecological taxes, the high Chinese demand among other factors.

The lower costs to set up those campaigns due to technology, allowing fast and cheap routing, designing and so on… This aspect resulted in an increase of mailing sent, and then it diminished the return on investment rates of mailing as a medium.

It discusses about the results of a recent study undertaken in the UK by Pitney & Bowes.

50% of respondents had experienced issues to generates lead due to the complexity of multichannel campaigns.

53% of European companies believe that cutting down their mailing budget to transfer it in emailing would have bad consequences on their business.

39% of respondents combine the mailing media with the Internet in order to generate leads, and this combination seems to be very effective.

Some thoughts about the article:

Multi channel is difficult to manage: This is true. It is difficult to analyze the results of a campaign as you need to see to which media one customer has been exposed. It is hence difficult to check return on investment… Moreover, it can become costly, as you constantly need to add some new media. This is the reason why social media can become costly at some point.

Nevertheless, some strong synergies can spring up once you have an appropriate mix to deal with it. Customer relationship management is all about finding the right mix between all media to create the best responsiveness from customers.

The mailing media is very appropriate for btob: It is high quality, you can target your customers efficiently, and actually you can be pretty creative with it. I loved to work on mailing campaign while I was a direct marketing manager at Ubifrance.